Condensed Matter > Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

Title:Mean field theory of hard sphere glasses and jamming

Abstract: Hard spheres are ubiquitous in condensed matter: they have been used as
models for liquids, crystals, colloidal systems, granular systems, and powders.
Packings of hard spheres are of even wider interest, as they are related to
important problems in information theory, such as digitalization of signals,
error correcting codes, and optimization problems. In three dimensions the
densest packing of identical hard spheres has been proven to be the FCC
lattice, and it is conjectured that the closest packing is ordered (a regular
lattice, e.g, a crystal) in low enough dimension. Still, amorphous packings
have attracted a lot of interest, because for polydisperse colloids and
granular materials the crystalline state is not obtained in experiments for
kinetic reasons. We review here a theory of amorphous packings, and more
generally glassy states, of hard spheres that is based on the replica method:
this theory gives predictions on the structure and thermodynamics of these
states. In dimensions between two and six these predictions can be successfully
compared with numerical simulations. We will also discuss the limit of large
dimension where an exact solution is possible. Some of the results we present
here have been already published, but others are original: in particular we
improved the discussion of the large dimension limit and we obtained new
results on the correlation function and the contact force distribution in three
dimensions. We also try here to clarify the main assumptions that are beyond
our theory and in particular the relation between our static computation and
the dynamical procedures used to construct amorphous packings.